Update: Einstein on the Beach - reflections

 Some footage from the Ann Arbor performance...

"You don't have to understand anything. It's a work where you go, and you can get lost...and that's the idea." - Robert Wilson

Return of the Revenge of the Random Ten

Let's take a look at what came up in cop-out-post land today, shall we?

• "Pride" by U2 - (3stars) - live version grabbed from a bootleg via bit torrent when I downloaded the entire U2 oeuvre a while back...I've been getting worse about doing that (sorry, Hilltop Hoods, Michael Martin Murphey, Beautiful South, Ryan Adams, Dave Matthews Band) torrent thing...this one's an okay live version, but there's nothing to distinguish it from a hundred other versions that just didn't have the fortune to be put to tape/electrons...great song from a great band, though...
• "Belong" by R.E.M. - (4 stars) - great, spoken-word song from the boys from Athens...love the wordless chorus and Michael Stipe's understated, poetic lyrics...screams early 90's to me...quality snaps and handclaps, too...'whispered with kong, kong, belong'...
• "El Hombre Impasible" by Cafe Tacuba - (3 stars) - no clue what this one's about...might be gorgeous love song or boastful throwdown...it's in Spanish, and I don't speak a lick of it...saw Cafe Tacuba on Austin City Limits a few years back and have been a casual fan since...this one's from their great Yo Soy album which is way more experimental than this track would suggest
• "Freddie's Dead" by Fishbone - (3 stars) - great song by Curtis Mayfield from the blacksplotation classic Superfly which I've sadly never seen...average cover by a weird, early 90's funk band
• "Running to Stand Still" by Elbow - (4 stars) - one of my favorite U2 songs...solid cover that heads a little more piano in mood but keeps the aching of the original
• "I Love a Rainy Night" by Eddie Rabbit - (4 stars) - man, I love this one...nice, pop country vibe with snaps and jangly guitar...I see the original black and white video (which I can't find on YouTube, sadly)...
• "L-O-V-E (Multi-lingual verson)" by Nat King Cole - (3 stars) - I appreciate when artists record hits in various languages...the Beatles "Sie liebt dich" and "Komm gib mir deine hand" come to mind best...this one's got a solid German verse in the middle...fun times...
• "Cold Sweat" by James Brown - (3 stars) - Live at the Apollo is a time capsule album, perfectly capturing what I imagine when I think of a James Brown show...this one's about right...nice playful interaction between the band and The Man, himself...
• "Defend Atlantis" by Flobots - (3 stars) - the album that has "Handlebars" also has a lot of weaker tracks...
• "Don't Get Me Wrong" by The Pretenders - (5 stars) - the best of the week came up first (but got posted last)...perfect song...

Random mix circa 3-15-12 from PHSChemGuy on 8tracks.

Really?

I'm sure people were innocent in the 1960's when "Nut Rocker" came out, but really?

I Love It

The Girl has said a number of times that I tend to fixate on music, listening over and over to a particular song or album to the exclusion of everything else.

This week's obsession comes from Down Under as the Hilltop Hoods released their first single from their new album, Drinking in the Sun, which hasn't been released just yet in the US. I did manage to find a copy on the torrent network, however, so I'll be taking a listen this weekend. I'll give a full reporting, promise.

For the moment, though, dig on the three official videos for the first single "I Love It", because I do.

The first is my preference and is kind of awesome...the other two certainly aren't bad, though...

Two of my passions

The Lego Architecture line has been out for a while now, presenting sets that are microscale versions of some pretty famous landmarks. I've bought (and gifted) the Sears Tower and would love to have Falling Water and the Robie House, but they're a little pricey to build and stick on a shelf somewhere - especially for a set without a minifig anywhere to be found.

All that's neither here nor there. What is, however, is that they're currently conducting a vote to see which buildings should inspire them for their next sets. They're not promising to actually produce any of the sets but just to see which buildings we want them to be inspired by.

It's interesting to see just how evenly split the vote is with all ten (as I write this post) between 16146 and 16530 votes. There's apparently no consensus among these ten.

Make your voice heard with your three votes.

Wikipedia: the cause of and solution to so many of our problems

Each day I look up some date in history and write that year as today's date on the board in my classroom.

Today, for example, was 12 March, 1912 in honor of the founding of the Girl Scouts. I then draw a stick figure representation of the event and encourage my students to guess the event. Especially considering my limited art skills, they do pretty well.

It helps me that Wikipedia has an article of every day's significant (by whatever definition the Wikipedia community chooses to define that word) events, births, and deaths. Check out March 12, for example.

I also tend to check the History Channel's Today in History as another source of events and today found that the 1888 blizzard that hit NYC and dumped 40" of snow happened on this date. In the History Channel's article on the blizzard, I found this sentence...

Even "Leather Man," a fixture of New York and Connecticut history who had walked a circuit of 365 miles every 34 days for three decades, was reportedly delayed four days by the Blizzard of 1888.

Clearly, I had to head to Wikipedia to find out about this "Leather Man". I quote from their article here...

The Leatherman (ca. 1839–1889) was a particular vagabond, famous for his handmade leather suit of clothes, who traveled a circuit between the Connecticut and the Hudson River from about 1856 to 1889. Although of unknown origin, he was thought to be Canadian, or possibly French, because of his fluency in French, his broken English and the French Language prayer book found on his person after his death. His identity remains controversial, and unknown.

How fascinating is that? He apparently made his 365-mile circuit around Connecticut every thirty-four days like clockwork, regularly enough that when the blizzard delayed him, people noticed.

I love...Love...LOVE that Wikipedia has documented Leather Man (or Leatherman or Leather-Man).

Could such a person exist in today's world? They could, right? It would be weird but not unheard of, I would guess.

The most wonderful time...of the year

I love March...love it...

I've seen a half dozen high school basketball games in the past few weeks (though, sadly, the Princeton Vikings came up short in both girls and boys this year). I also managed to catch the Bellarmine-NKU women's game a while back and am hoping to catch Bellarmine's men's team in the elite eight in a week or so.

Plus, the D-I championships are ready to get under way after eight of the top ten teams (including all of the top four) lost this past week.

And, MIT is playing the D-III national semifinals this weekend. Go Engineers!

Now I just have to get to Thursday so I can watch games for four straight days.

My eyes, the links do nothing!

• The LACMA rock is slowly rumbling over to Los Angeles - It's a big rock, and yet I kinda want to see it moving along. 
• TV Show Promo of the Day - I can't wait until Thursday.
• TV Show Promo of the Day - I still can't wait until Thursday.
• Early Bird Special - How to handle a bowl of water.
• Nothing illegal about booze-brewing still - Good to know there's always a backup career in Hamilton.
• The Most Astounding Fact - Yes, it is. This one catches my breath every time I think about it.

• The Story of the "Keep Calm and Carry On" poster - Keep calm and watch it.
• Hero Mom of the Day - This is both heroic and tragic.
• Larry and Ervin Still Magic - No two sports figures have ever been more tightly linked.
• Watchmen-Too - I totally want to read the squid's story.
• Paula's 7-minute burger - Another place to try a burger

• Stand Up Kid of the Day - I love the tone.
• Stop-motion Short of the Day - Gorgeous, as always
• Santorum Santorum says of the Day - Really? Separation of church and state makes him want to throw up?
• The Ultimate Sesame Street quiz - I got 42% and am sad.

 

I hate horror...

That's part one of an eighty-part found-footage horror series on YouTube.

I hate Matt for showing it to me because it's terrifying and well done and frustrating and thoroughly engrossing and scary as hell.

I'm currently somewhere around part 35 or so (entry 26) - most of which are posted by MarbleHornets but some of which posted by ToTheArk.

I know it's all fiction and that there's even a Wiki site about the series, but I'm still freaked out. I'm gonna put the book in the freezer for tonight and head to bed - hopefully to pleasant dreams.

Whither Henryville?

I don't know what to say about the destruction in Henryville, IN.

I knew a teacher at Henryville High School a couple of decades ago and grew up not twenty miles from the High School that no longer exists.

I know I wondered why Princeton cancelled all evening activities this past Friday night, but I stopped wondering after I heard the stories on Saturday morning. Moscow, OH...Henryville, IN...and lots of other cities saw destruction that I hope never to experience but know that I'm lucky to have never seen. Thirty nine people died in one of the largest early-season tornadic outbreaks in recorded history.

I wish the families and folks well.

I can happily say that my folks lost nothing more serious than an awning, but I'll be sending my donation to help out. Give if you've got a couple of bucks.

Vonne Gut Reactions: Mother Night

Three down...eleven novels (and various short story compilations) to go...

Finally, this is what I was looking for from Vonnegut. There's nobody from Mercury, nobody being replaced by a computer, no futuristic settings, no harmoniums, no peat carved into sirens. Instead we get people...humans...flawed and imperfect.

As always, spoilers abound...

You have been warned...

Vonnegut opens the book with an introduction in which he writes "This is the only story of mine whose moral I know. I don't think it's a marvelous moral, I just happen to know what it is...'We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be' " and amends that "When you're dead, you're dead." and even offers that "yet another moral occurs to [him] now; Make love when you can. It's good for you."

The simplistic, direct route makes for a pretty spectacular Vonnegut introduction, tying himself into the background of the book, having been a World War II soldier, himself. The rest of the book is framed as being a memoir of Howard W Campbell, Jr., a Nazi propagandist and broadcaster who was secretly an American agent providing coded messages in his daily radio broadcasts during World War II.

Very few people, however, know that Campbell was an American spy - himself, his army contact, and FDR, himself. Everyone else in the world believes Campbell to be a former Nazi now living in New York City as an old, broken man with one friend, a chess player who lives in an apartment downstairs.

Once Campbell's open secret gets out, however, his life turns to crap pretty quickly as he is 'saved' by a white supremacist (with a black chauffeur), reunited with his 'wife' (lost and assumed dead for thirty years), captured by American agents, attacked by the American soldier who captured him in World War II, forced from his home by looters, and finally taken to Israel to stand trial as he hands himself over to a Jewish dentist in his apartment building.

It's not exactly a laugh riot, admittedly, but it is the best thing I've read in Vonnegut's first three novels in spite of the fact that Vonnegut himself gave The Sirens of Titan an A grade.

---

We continue to struggle to find a fully-realized female character as Calen had wondered from book one. The only two female characters are Campbell's wife Helga, who isn't in the novel much and whose position on a pedestal is to high and unassailable that the second female character, Resi, Helga's sister, is able to impersonate Helga with little more than a dye job and a story. So much of Campbell's life image is wrapped up in his wife that her disappearance - with no conclusive end - just ruins him to the modern day, but that doesn't mean that Helga is anything resembling a three-dimensional character. She is written in reflection as the madonna and the whore (Campbell's The Monogamous Casanova is about as clear a paean to wanting a woman to be both of those identities as is possible), as the perfect actress, as the most beautiful woman ever...but she isn't a person in any real way.

Resi, then, loves Campbell as a thirteen- (or so) year old, but it is played as puppy love, something that Campbell brushes off with little thought but who then comes back to be Campbell's Helga just when he needs her the most. Resi, however, doesn't love Campbell in any rich, well thought-out way but rather looks to trap Campbell in the memory of a false love and then reveal herself after one night of connubial bliss. There isn't a relationship there. There isn't love. There's deception that - once achieved - is immediately abandoned.

---

Vonnegut's exploration of  belief systems that he clearly finds abhorrent is fascinating as he describes the white supremacists as deliberately filing the teeth off of their mental gears, something that he speaks proudly of having never done to himself. He may have lied; he may have had teeth missing from those gears, but he never deliberately filed he own gears dull. He may have spent forty years playing the best possible Nazi he could while secretly - and only to three people in the world - supporting America, promoting the Nazi beliefs far and wide over the air waves. He drew caricatures of jews for target practice, thinking he was drawing a ridiculous stereotype but instead finding that his Nazi masters loved the target, that Campbell's work increased the shooting skills of Nazis, and that the white supremacists were still using the target.

Campbell at one point is asked by the Blue Fairy, his American spy handler, where he would have been had the Nazis won, had Campbell never been able to tell anyone that he was really an American agent. Campbell says he would certainly have lead a successful life high up in the Nazi hierarchy, continuing as a propagandist but not ever writing a novel or play again in his life. He might not have believed the Nazi beliefs, but he had played the part long enough and well enough that he would continue to play it through simple momentum for a few more decades.

---

In Mother Night we again get Vonnegut musing on friendship and particularly on the traitorous end of friendship. In Sirens of Titan, Unk/Malachi killed his best friend on Mars, Stony Stevenson, because the Martians controlled his brain and wiped his memories of Stony. The traitorous act haunted Unk/Malachi until the end of his life, only being resolved in a fever dream on the moment of his death.

Here Campbell recounts the tale of two significant betrayals of friendship. The first is Campbell's betrayal, taking his friend's motorcycle, the one significant possession his friend had in the falling moments of Nazi Germany. Campbell's friend even tells him that the motorcycle is the only thing that ever mattered to him, that he wouldn't give up smoking to save his wife but that he gave up smoking to save his motorcycle. Campbell, then, 'borrowed' the motorcycle knowing that he would never return it.

In his later days Campbell was the victim of such a betrayal as his downstairs neighbor and only friend in New York City Kraft/Potapov turns out to be a Russian spy who decides to turn him over the to Russian authorities but finds himself captured instead by the American agents lead by the Blue Fairy Godmother.

---

Onward we roll along to Vonnegut's return to science fiction with Cat's Cradle.

Cover tune grab bag

Thanks to Daily What's Kicka$$ Cover of the Day series for showing me this one.



And to me for wandering onward to find the rest of MercyMe's Cover Tune Grab Bag series.

Links: The Links

Matt Damon!

• Jimmy Kimmel's Movie: The Movie - Funny stuff, I tell ya.

• The Daly Show - It's a mini JLA reuinion 
• Devastation in Indiana -  I've been to Henryville High School...knew the principal there a couple of decades ago. That's scary stuff.
• Midget revenge is the only kind of revenge that works - plus it's funnier...

• Elevator Prank of the Day - The timing that would have taken is impressive. 
• Artificial rainbow of the day - They've rebuilt the bifrost.
• Lady Gaga periodic table - Sometimes the internet is chucklesome.

• Own goal of the day - And you don't mess around with Jim. 
• Speechjammer stops people from talking - I'm curious to see/hear what it sounds like.

• Teaser trailer of the day - I've seen it a dozen times, and I still laugh.
• End of an era of the day - Google censors santorum results. This seems problematic.

My choices...

EW.com's got a list of their 25 Greatest Working directors. Because it's my blog and I'm a narcissist, here are my favorite movies from each of those directors...

• 25 - Guillermo del Toro - Pan's Labyrinth (surprisingly tough call over Hellboy II)
• 24 - Pedro Almodovar - um, who?
• 23 - Spike Lee - 25th Hour (or Inside Man)
• 22 - Brad Bird - Ratatouille 
• 21 - Clint Eastwood - Unforgiven
• 20 - David Lynch - The Straight Story 
• 19 - Werner Herzog - Grizzly Man 
• 18 - Peter Jackson - Lord of the Rings: Return of the King 
• 17 - Roman Polanski - Chinatown 
• 16 - Todd Haynes - Far From Heaven 
• 15 - James Cameron - The Terminator 
• 14 - Mike Leigh - um, who?
• 13 - Darren Arnofsky - The Fountain (Pi and Black Swan are pretty awesome, too)
• 12 - Lars von Trier - Dogville 
• 11 - Woddy Allen - Annie Hall 
• 10 - Paul Thomas Anderson -Boogie Nights (with Punch Drunk Love a close second)
• 9 - Kathryn Bigelow - The Hurt Locker 
• 8 - Alexander Payne - Election 
• 7 - Joel & Ethan Coen - The Big Lebowski (surprisingly stiff competition from True Grit, No Country for Old Men, O, Brother Where Art Thou, and Raising Arizona)
• 6 - Terrence Malick - The Thin Red Line 
• 5 - Christopher Nolan - The Dark Knight (tough choice over pretty much everything else he's done)
• 4 - Martin Scorsese - Goodfellas (tough over Raging Bull, The Last Waltz, Taxi Driver)
• 3 - David Fincher - Fight Club 
• 2 - Quentin Tarantino - Inglorious Basterds 
• 1 - Steven Speilberg - 1941 (I was surprised how many of his movies I like but how few I love.)

Einstein on the Beach - reflections

We're a month out from having traveled to the northern, frozen wastelands of Ann Arbor, MI (though it won't be frozen for long) to see the opening night preview performance of Philip Glass and Robert Wilson's Einstein on the Beach, the first performance of the opera in twenty years, the opening preview night of only the fifth staging of the opera ever.

First off, I will say that it's an amazing piece of work - the music, the performance, the repetition, the experience, everything. The opera has to be one of the most unique, stunning, repetitive, meditative experiences that I've ever been a part of. I don't know that I understand the piece - even a tenth or a hundredth of the piece, but I'm absolutely thrilled that I was there.

The work was, admittedly, long - four and a half hours in length, top to tail, performed without an intermission, meaning that people had to make their own breaks. The Girl took two breaks in the performance, but I never left the theater. It made for a very odd, gorgeous experience with acts and scenes progressing with little connection from one to the other, something that I've certainly never experienced in my theater-going experience.



I keep struggling to use the term 'opera' to describe Einstein as my views of opera have always involved telling a story via song, acting, and dance, and Einstein certainly isn't any sort of storytelling. It is, in fact, the antithesis of story. Each act, each scene (?), each movement seems to exist in total independence of the others, utilizing the same performers but often without any relation to them having been on stage previously. The music is repetitive to a fault, something that I found meditative and gorgeous but something that The Girl found - and know going in that she would find - the music droning and tedious.

To me the repetition of the music allowed me to often slip away from the music, to let my mind drift and focus on the details of the performance. At times there was so much action on stage - a dozen performers each moving and singing, dancing or standing still but shifting their head or their hands or even one finger - that I found the visuals hard to follow. I had to choose to follow one performer for a time and then to shift my attention elsewhere, only to find myself shocked at the changes that had taken place before I could look back.

At other times, the repetition took place around a nearly empty stage with two, one, or - in one notable scene shown at the top of this post - no one on stage for twenty (?) minutes in which a single, brilliant, huge bar of light shifted from horizontal to vertical and then rose off the stage at a glacial pace. Neither - the action-filled stage or the person-less stage was any less fascinating. Both were utterly mesmerizing.

The above scene, for example (photo from the 1992 production), consisted of...

• the man in red (front, right) writing on an invisible chalkboard with one repeated motion for twenty minutes without any other motion
• the boy on the balcony holding and rotating a glowing cube for minutes at a time breaking his motion up only by pulling paper airplanes from his satchel and throwing them onto the stage
• the two-dimensional train smoking for the full twenty minutes before finally sliding onto the stage while the engineer smoked his pipe, not speaking or moving otherwise
• one dancer methodically dancing diagonally back and forth from the back right to front left corner, sometimes seeming to move slightly further left with each pass and sometimes seeming to make the exact...same...path with every pass...the pacing of the dancing, the other motion going on the whole time made it almost impossible to discern whether the progression was real or in my mind
• the newspaper-holding dancer working his way across the stage in an labyrinthine but rectilinear pathway full of ninety degree angles
• the shell-holding man on the left walking almost as John Cleese's Ministry of Silly Walks sketch across the stage

I wanted to watch every person to see what they were doing, to see if they would make some change to their action that would reveal something, but I couldn't watch them all so I found myself having to alternately split my attention among them all and focus on one to the exclusion of the others knowing that it was the only way I could  have any hope of being anything other than surprised by the changes I had missed.

Though every scene was both stunning and tedious, three scenes in particularly stood out to me:

• The person-less stage with the light making progress with the music became an entirely meditative moment, knowing that the motion was so slow that I could turn away but knowing that there was nothing to which I could turn my attention. It was gorgeous.
• One scene in particular had an extended saxophone solo played while the entire cast - twenty-plus performers - came onto the stage to stand in front of a scrim on which was painted a building (shown to the right in the 1992 production) with a man with chalk. The saxophone was so different from the rest of the music, almost something you would hear in a 1980's movie soundtrack over a long pair of legs - only if those legs were on screen for half an hour (maybe, I lost track of time repeatedly through the night) while every performer walked on stage one at a time, turning to look at the chalk-holding man before another performer entered.
• The finale was a huge set piece with the whole orchestra and all the performers on a three-story set, each standing in front of a light design or circles, graphs, and lines while two identically-dressed performers shifted up and down, back and forth across the stage in glass boxes.The scale of the set was stunning after so many minimalist sets, sometimes no more than light on a blank stage with ballet dancers crossing the stage.

There were very few things that I could definitively say reference Einstein, and none of those were ever made obvious or overt.

• The concept of trains appeared numerous times, and I know Einstein initially described the theory of relativity, the concept that each of us moves in reference to our frame as two people on neighboring trains seeing the other begin to move and not knowing which of them was moving. Movement from either without a non-moving frame of reference would be impossible to identify as movement from either.
• At one point the singers stuck out their tongues after furiously 'brushing' their teeth with toothbrushes. Einstein does have a famous photo of him sticking his tongue out.
• The trial scenes took place in front of a backdrop of an eclipse with two pinpoints of light, one on each side of the moon. One of the most famous public proofs of the theory of relativity involved the lensing of a distant star around an eclipse, allowing us to see in action the lensing effects of gravity.
• A scrim dropped in front of the three-story scene depicting an atomic explosion (a mushroom cloud) with scientific explanations abounding. Einstein certainly had much to do with the ideas behind the atomic bomb.

Other than those, I really don't know what much of the piece had to do with Einstein...which is both beautiful and frustrating.

There was a film booth in the theater lobby in which anyone could sit down and give their impressions - before, during, after the performances. We eschewed the booth, even as the opening night performance was held back half an hour due to the nasty, snow-covered roads. I did, however, get to spend some time in the lobby (we got there forty-five minutes before the intended curtain) watching the guy on the right of this video.

I couldn't tell if he was entirely there, somehow mentally off, or just eccentric. The Girl came down in the camp of eccentric.



I was amazed at how many times in the performance I laughed. Because of the constant repetition, even the smallest human moments were beautifully rewarding. When one performer, for example, stalked onto the stage with exaggerated, dramatic steps and turned toward the crowd flashing a huge smile, the entire audience laughed out loud. Such small moments because huge because of the lack of time frame, the disconnection from the passage of time - something that I imagine was referencing Einstein, as well.

There are very few photos - and no videos - from the 2012 performances that I can find online. Here are the few (all of which will make gorgeous desktop backgrounds at school) that I can find thanks to the pomegranate arts who put on this year's shows.

You can get some scenes from the 1984 production below, interspersed with interview clips with Wilson and Glass, themselves. The 2012 production was, from what I can see in all the images and clips on the web, substantively identical to the 1984 (and, I assume, original productions). Einstein - in a surprisingly small part, really - was played by an Asian women instead of a white man, but the sets, the costumes, the staging that you can see in the video are all very much like what we saw in Ann Arbor.



If you want to know more about Einstein, check out this documentary on the opera. You'll get to see footage from the 1984 production. It's uploaded to YouTube in its entirety but broken into four parts totaling nearly an hour long.



Everyone at a musical performance takes in the performance on their own. This work, however, seems even more so as there is no story, no path to take with your fellow theater-goers. To this end, I thoroughly enjoyed the reactions of the people near us.

The Girl was beside an older couple who spent large swaths of the performance dozing.

We had a couple behind us who leaned in as the bar of light tilted and rose and asked each other, "Do you know what this movement is called?"..."How to waste ten minutes."...Ten minutes later they leaned together and amended the previous statement to "twenty minutes"...

Beside me, sitting solo at the end of our row, was a man who knew the music backwards and forward, asking me why people would be leaving at this moment, if they had no idea what was coming next. I didn't admit to him that I didn't have any clue what was coming, that I'd never actually listened to the work in its entirety - or as entire as the three-cd set that I have (and that is apparently four cds).

To quote these people who were at the Saturday performance (I was at Friday's), "I think this is one of Philip Glass's best operas about Einstein."



I would certainly agree with that assessment, and I'm thrilled that I got to see this phenomenal work in its entirety.

...and I owe The Girl big time...

The Blanks or the Worthless Peons

Ted's band from Scrubs...turns out they're kinda a real band

The links of the weak

Short list of links this week...maybe more next week...maybe...

• Pearl Jam: "Jeremy (Lin)" - Thanks, Googs
• After Watchmen - Comedy gold but with some references that only comic book folks will get
• The Ivory Bangers - Hey, I know those guys.

• The 46th Anniversary of the Assassination of Malcolm X - This year is actually the 47th, but the video is the revelation. Listen to the man.
• Tilt-shift thing of the day - City of Samba is gorgeous

The City of Samba from Jarbas Agnelli on Vimeo.

• Million dollar book proves Kickstarter model, now authors just need the reach - Major props to Rich Burlew and all the OOTS folks. 
• "Mug Shot" - VeryMaryKate strikes again.

• Heartland Institute documents reveal strategy of attacks against climate science - I think most of us suspected/knew that the conservative side was against science, but this is a little much. I need to read some of these books.
• Fark's 2011 Geek Headline Contest - I may've posted this before.
• Steve Carell on Twitter - funny guy
• For Science of the Day - "Science Nation Army"

From the weekend...

This past weekend's SNL was outstanding...enjoy 'em...


Can't go wrong with Justin Timberlake...

Vonne Gut Reactions: The Sirens of Titan

We continue to roll along with the second of Kurt Vonnegut's novels: The Sirens of Titan.

As I've mentioned before, spoilers abound.

You have been warned...

• First, a quick summary of the plot...Malachi Constant is rich through no efforts of his own. Winston Niles Rumfoord is a wealthy man who through a MacGuffin of space travel - a chrono-synclastic infundibulum - which shifts Rumfoord's existence into a wavefunction, manifesting in different locations at different times as well as seeing his past, present and future. Rumfoord tells Malachi and Beatrice (Rumfoord's wife) their futures, and though both do everything in their power to stop it from coming true, both march toward their future exactly as Rumfoord forsees, taking part in an invasion of Earth from Mars, stopping on Mercury, living on Mars, and eventually returning to die on Earth.
• There's a strong similarity here between the world view of Rumfoord - all future events have already taken place, there's no reason to fight them - and that of Billy Pilgrim (from Slaughterhouse Five) once he becomes unstuck in time. It's a semi-convenient conceit that removes any sort of guilt or responsibility from any of their actions. It means that all of Rumfoord's actions - uniting the people of Earth, leading an attack on Earth from Mars, manipulating Malachi's mind and entire future - aren't anything that we can blame on him. Everything that he's done has been - according to his view of the past and future already having happened - pre-ordained. He's not to be blamed. For some reason in Slaughterhouse Five this didn't bother me - maybe because Billy never acts immorally. Rumfoord, on the other hand, seems to manipulate nearly every single person on Earth. He destroys the idea of religion; kidnaps some people of Earth, brainwashes them, and send them to die attacking Earth. None of this seems too moral and everything, so I want to blame Rumfoord - but I can't because his actions have already happened, even his lying about Malachi's future.
• The Tralfamadorians make an appearance here for the first time in Vonnegut's oeuvre. Yay!
• Last time we checked in on Vonnegut, Calen had asked whether Vonnegut's female character would develop to be any more three-dimensional. Well, I'm not thinking this book is going to help Vonnegut's case with Calen. There's only one female character in the whole book, and she's pretty much entirely passive, letting the action happen around her. Beatrice certainly isn't passing the Bechdel test any time soon. Beatrice has married Rumfoord out of duty and not love. She gets abducted to Mars. She has a kid by Constant but doesn't love Malachi. She returns to Earth with her son through no initiative of her own. She heads to Titan because she's told she has to. She eventually falls in love with Malachi because he's the only one around. Wow...that's rich characterization. She's like a friggin' prop. There's no desire on her part; there's no impression that she's got any hopes or dreams other than briefly to resist the fickle hand of fate - and she fails miserably at that.
  
  Apparently we're still looking for Vonnegut's first rich female character. Maybe Mother Night will help us out.
• In the long run The Sirens of Titan is a road movie. Malachi's on Earth and gets told he's going to Mars, Mercury, and Titan. The entirety of the book is just a case of getting Malachi to Titan. It's actually a little reminiscent of the old road movies, too, because the characters don't seem to grow or change much along the way. Malachi opens without any direction and ends the same way. He heads to Mars and gets his brain sucked out of his head but doesn't gain any insight, doesn't become any more...well, any more anything. Malachi is at the whims of fate, and he doesn't seem to have taught us - or himself - anything what so ever. 
• If the characters don't change in any way and don't have anything to tell us, then they better be part of a pretty spectacular journey. Only they aren't. The stop over on Mars seems pretty pointless other than to have Malachi's brain wiped. The time on Mercury doesn't seem to change Malachi in any way other than to have him wander around in a cave pointlessly. The time on Titan seems pretty pointless, letting Malachi and Beatrice fall in love which is conveyed by them not living together, generally not liking each other, and sleeping together once every few months. If that's not love, what's going on?
• Calen hated the time on Mercury. I'll let her explain in the comments.
• There goes religion out the window at long last - long being two whole novels, though Player Piano wasn't exactly pro-religion, of course. Vonnegut was one of the world's more well-known secular humanists, and his anti-religion bent comes through loud and clear here as the entire point of the Mars (I won't say martian because the entire invasion force is displaced Earth humans - except for one human child born on Mars) is seemingly to destroy the religions of Earth, replacing them with the Church of God the Utterly Indifferent, part of whose creed is "I was a victim of a series of accidents, as are we all." As Calen points out, however, the acceptance of a series of beliefs without proof is a religion whether it purports to explain creation or anything else is pretty much a religion. Looks like Vonnegut's destruction of religion seems to have created a new religion.
  
  Sort of defeats the purpose, eh?
• In the end the entire purpose to the actions in the book seems to be a set up by the Tralfamadorians to get a repair part to a spaceship that broke down on Titan. The ship's been broken down for more than 200,000 years, and Salo - the robot pilot headed for a distant galaxy. Turns out that the Tralfamadorians have been directing our society pretty much forever all with the goal of getting messages to Salo. Stonehenge, the Great Wall of China, the Kremlin - all directed by distant society on a distant planet to pass a message along. Of course, that had already happened in the future already. No reason to think they were being manipulative or mean. They were just doing the things they had already done in the future.
• When I passed the book along to Calen (see, I'm checking out two volumes of each of the books and passing one along to Calen, typically at school), one of the English teachers at our school raved about this book. It's apparently her favorite Vonnegut book ever.
  
  She's weird.
• Apparently, though, there are lots of people who love this book. Douglas Adams, according to Wikipedia, says The Sirens of Titan was a big influence on Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy:

  "Sirens of Titan is just one of those books – you read it through the first time and you think it's very loosely, casually written. You think the fact that everything suddenly makes such good sense at the end is almost accidental. And then you read it a few more times, simultaneously finding out more about writing yourself, and you realize what an absolute tour de force it was, making something as beautifully honed as that appear so casual."

• It's interesting that Vonnegut destroys religion after having one of his characters get filthy rich by following the first forty or so letters of the Bible.

Onward to Mother Night.

As I write this, however, I'm already a hundred-fifty pages into that one. With only two-hundred-two pages total in the book, this one shouldn't take much longer.

Lonnieburger Baskets: Sidetracks

Though it may appear that the quest for the perfect burger has stalled, the quest marches on.

Yes, it's pretty clear to me that Terry's has the best burgers in town with Senate and Cafe de Wheels in close second and third, respectively. There is always, however, the hope that we'll find another spectacular burger in the Cincy area.

Source: AnnArbor.com

And there's the hope that when we go on vacation we can find a great burger out in the non-Queen City part of the world. To that end we dropped into Sidetrack Bar and Grill in Ypsilanti, MI back in January. Considering that GQ named the Sidetrack burger one of the twenty burgers you must eat before you die (Sidetrack camein at #19), hopes were high. Should they have been? Let's look at the numbers...

Here's what GQ had to say...

19. Our Famous Burger,

Sidetrack Bar and Grill - Ypsilanti, MI
Here is one of my core culinary credos: The closer you come to a college campus, the worse burgers get. Sidetrack Bar and Grill—named for its location next to an old railroad siding—is an exception. This modern-looking pub, around since 1850, doesn’t seem concerned with pleasing undiscerning Eastern Michigan University freshmen. “We don’t get much of a young crowd,” my waitress said. The meat, a secret blend, tastes like chuck. The sesame-seed bun is small, soft, and grilled. I recommend a visit to the automobile museum across the street, although they won’t let you play drive-in and eat your burger in a vintage car.

Burger

• Man, I didn't get any particularly impressive 'secret blend' of spices here. The burger was a burger. There's a little pepper in there I can see, but I didn't taste much of anything outside simple, decent quality burger meat. The patty was a little on the shiny side but not unreasonably so. Burger - 6 

Toppings

•  For winter, that's not a bad tomato slice. The lettuce is lettuce. The bacon was well done but not as crisp as I would like it. The bacon was flavorful. The cheddar was amply applied with a large slice melted all across the patty and even onto the bun. The toppings are solid but unspectacular, something that's pretty much what I can say across the board about this burger. Toppings - 6 

Fries

• Fries are offered either plain or with cajun spices, garlic, or salt and pepper (each for an extra fifty cents). They also have sweet potato fries for an extra back. The Girl chose the regular fries, and I went for the garlic option. If you're not gonna splurge on vacation, when are you gonna splurge? My fries came out without any garlic, however, so I can't speak to the spice options. Both my fries and The Girl's fries came out hot and well cooked. They could have been crisper, but they weren't greasy or limp by any means. Fries - 6 

Ambiance

• This is easily the best part of Sidetracks. The main bar feels authentically old, and the whole place has gorgeous woodwork, a fireplace that was roaring fire when we were there, a beautiful huge mirror behind the old bar, and nice windows showing the snow-covered streets of Ypsilanti. The ceiling is old tin, and the place feels right. We ate at an off time, around 2-3pm, so Sidetracks wasn't crowded, but it still felt like home. Ambiance - 8

Cost

• A burger is just $9.25 with fries and bacon. I added cheese (50 cents) fries spice (50 cents but not actually served). The diet coke was $2.25. That's...um...$12.50. Not good...Cost - 3 

Other Schtuff

• When I ordered a Diet Coke, they brought me an extra carafe of Diet Coke. That's very cool. +1
• Seriously, love the woodwork all around. +1
• Um...that's about all I've got.

To the totaling...totalization...adding crap up...

+1 +1 +3 +8 +6 +6 +6...That's like a zillion...Or 31...One of the best burgers in the country, one of the burgers you have to eat before you die only got 31 points?

Kinda disappointing...

• Terry's Turf Club - 45
• Cafe de Wheels - 44
• Senate - 43 
• City View Tavern - 40 (scaled from 32/40)
• Stuffed on Vine - 38
• Five Guys Burgers and Fries - 36 
• Roxy's - 36
• VanZandt - 34
• Gabby's - 34 
• Oakley Pub & Grill - 34 
• Quatman's - 32 / 34.5
• Troy's - 32 
• By Golly's - 32
• Wildflower Cafe - 31.25 (scaled from 26/40) 
• Sidetracks - 31
• Virgil's Cafe - 28
• The Pub at Rookwood Mews - 28
• Smashburger - 28
• Habits Cafe - 28
• Graffiti Burger - 27
• Arthur's - 26
• Sammy's - 25 
• Gordo's - 20

Even though there are only 18 better burgers in the nation according to GQ, we have fourteen better burgers in Cincinnati.

I'm thinking GQ lied.